Review: Atomic Habits by James Clear

A clear, practical guide to developing good habits. The information in this book is fairly solid and worth reading for most people. My only concern is whether the information is presented in a way that is effective: that is, after reading this book, what percentage of people will actually change their behavior? I suppose this is the ultimate question of all self-improvement books, but I found that this one in particular, while effective at organizing and presenting information, didn’t do it in such a way that I was immediately motivated to act on it. In short, I found it to be an educational book, but not an inspirational one.

However, an important note: before reading this book, I was already reasonably good at building good habits. For example, about 6 years ago, I got myself into the habit of taking notes whenever I read nonfiction, and after finishing a book, summarizing those notes on GoodReads as part of my review; in fact, that’s what you’re reading here right now! I’ve managed to keep this habit for years and have now written reviews and summaries for hundreds of other books. Oddly enough, it was this habit—writing the very notes you’re reading now—that got me to act on some of the advice in Atomic Habits (namely: I’m starting a habit journal and focusing on slower progress in fitness). But if I didn’t already have this habit, would this book have helped me make any changes in my life? I’m not sure.

That said, it’s still a useful read. Here are some of the key takeaways for me:

1. Your life today is the sum of your habits.

• “Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. You get what you repeat.”

• If you get your habits right, the rest will follow. Therefore, you should be more concerned with your trajectory than your current position.

• The 4 stages of forming a habit are cue, craving, response, reward. The cue triggers your brain to initiate some action; the craving provides the motivation to take a specific action; the response is the action you actually take; and the reward is what you get in response for that action. For example, the cue might be a stressful day at work, which makes you crave a relief from all that anxiety, which leads to the response that you head outside and smoke, which gives you the reward of getting away from work and the relaxation you get from the cigarette.

• If you want to create good habits, you need all 4 of those ingredients in sufficient qualities: you need something to trigger the habit, you need it to produce a strong enough craving to motivate you take act on that habit, the response must be easy enough that you actually do it, and the reward must be satisfying enough that you keep doing it. The inverse is also true: if you want to break a bad habit, you can do it by interfering with any of these 4 ingredients.

2. Small habits add up to something big.

• Small habits are like compound interest. If you keep investing, even just a little bit, over time, the returns are exponential.

• The best way to form habits is typically to start small—so small, that it may seem inconsequential. To get yourself to exercise, you might start with just 5 minutes of exercise per day; to get yourself to write more, you might start with writing just 1 paragraph per day. Just about everyone can take these tiny first steps, and sticking with easy habits is, well, fairly easy. And while the initial habit mmight not have much effect, the important part is that it got you started.

• To make progress, you need to continue making tiny tiny little steps forward: 1% improvements, like adding 1 more minute of exercise each week, or 1 more paragraph of writing. Again, taking small steps forward is fairly easy, but these tiny improvements can add up astonishingly fast. A 1% improvement each day may not seem like much, but it adds up to a ~37x improvement over the course of a year. Exponential progress is powerful.

3. Exponential progress is hard to see, initially.

• One of the trickiest things with forming habits around small steps and exponential progress is that in the early days, it’s hard to see any effect at all, which can be very demotivating. E.g., You won’t see much change in your body from just 5 minutes of exercise per day, and you won’t become a famous writer with just 1 paragraph of writing per day.

• However, even though you can’t see it, those investments are making a difference. Think of an ice cube in a room that starts at 20 degrees and is slowly warming up. As the temperature goes to 21 degrees, 22, 23, etc, you initially see no changes in that ice cube whatsoever. And yet, progress is being made. It’s only when you finally get to 30 degrees, 31, and 32 that, suddenly, a dramatic change is visible. Almost all the change is only visible at the end, but you couldn’t have gotten there without investing all the energy in the beginning an middle.

• Much of life works that way. That’s why it’s essential to form habits now and keep investing, even if it doesn’t seem to be making a difference initially. The effect of compound interest is delayed.

4. Patience is essential.

• Because progress is so hard to see, patience is an essential part of success. The media loves to tell sensational stories of overnight success, but the reality is that almost all great accomplishments take a long, long time.

• In fact, small, incremental progress is typically more effective and sustainable than large jumps, even if you think you have the ability to make a large jump. For example, if you have a habit of weight lifting, and one day, you try to make a 30 pound jump in your squat, there’s a chance you’ll injure yourself, or even if you don’t, make yourself exceptional sore, either of which can be a setback and even break your habit. If you instead stay patient and stick with much smaller increments—e.g., just a 1 pound increase from your last workout—you’ll almost always succeed, the risk of injury is low, and over time, these small increments add up shockingly quickly, and you’ll far surpass the person trying to do bigger jumps.

5. Focus on systems more than goals.

• Much of the modern world is obsessed with setting and accomplishing goals. But it’s far more important to focus on putting in place a system to achieve your goals than the goals themselves.

• That’s because, when life gets tough, you don’t rise to the level of your goals; instead, you fall to the level of your systems. If you don’t have a good system in place, you’ll never accomplish your goals; but if you have a good system in place, then the score will take care of itself. Get the inputs right, and the outputs will work out.

6. The best way to put a good system in place is to make it part of your identity.

• If you want to form a new habit to accomplish some goal, instead of focusing on the goal itself, focus on becoming the type of person that can accomplish that goal.

• Example: instead of focusing on trying to lose weight, become the type of person who never misses a workout. Make it part of your identity, and your own pride will help you turn it into a habit.

• To make something part of your identity, you need to gradually show yourself evidence that that person is really you. For example, start with a small exercise habit (e.g., 5 minutes of exercise) that is easy to succeed at. Seeing yourself exercise every day will let you build up some evidence that you’re the type of person who never misses a workout. You then gradually ramp the workouts up, and each time you succeed and get some exercise in, you’ll see yourself more and more as the person who never misses a workout. You’ll start telling others that. You’ll start being that person. And once it’s part of your identity, it becomes a much easier habit to maintain.

• Note that this can be a double-edged sword. Bad habits can also come from some part of your identity. E.g., If you identify yourself as someone who is bad at math or someone who can’t remember names, then because you’ve made those bad habits part of who you are, it’ll be hard to change them. So be very careful with what you make part of your identity!

7. Trigger new habits with existing ones.

• Examples: when I have my first cup of coffee in the morning (existing habit), I will do 2 minutes of meditation (new habit); just before heading to lunch each day (existing habit), I will do 10 push-ups (new habit).

• The existing habit becomes a trigger for your new one. By leveraging behaviors you already do, and especially behaviors you enjoy, you can make it easier to pick up new behaviors.

• Note: try to be very specific when identifying the trigger. For example, “do 2 minutes of meditation in the morning” is not nearly as good as “do 2 minutes of meditation when I have my first cup of coffee”, as “in the morning” is a vague time period that won’t be nearly as effective of a trigger as “first cup of coffee.”

8. Make the habit satisfying.

• Triggers can help you start doing a habit, but to reinforce that habit so you keep doing it over the long term, it needs to be satisfying in some way. Some habits are inherently satisfying (e.g., you might starting getting a “runner’s high” once you start running), but for those that aren’t, or where the satisfaction won’t be visible until much later (e.g., after years of training), you’ll want to deliberately add some sort of reward.

• Example: each time you manage to go to the yoga studio and do a good hour of stretching, reward yourself with a tasty snack from their cafe. Your brain will then slowly associate Friday the reward of yoga with yummy food, and it’ll become a fun outing, rather than a chore.

9. The environment has a huge impact on your habits.

• People who are good at creating new habits don’t necessarily have better willpower than others; instead, they are just better at structuring their environment so they don’t have to exercise their willpower in the first place. You should strive to design your world so that it’s easy to do the right thing.

• For example, if you walk into the kitchen, and there is a plate of cookies on the table, you might be tempted to eat one, even if you’re not hungry. If you’re trying to get into a habit of eating healthy, using your willpower to try to resist those cookies every single time you walk into the kitchen is going to be a losing battle. A far more effective technique is to get those cookies out of sight; or even better, not have them in the house in the first place.

• It’s also a good idea to try to tie each environment to exactly 1 habit, and to avoid mixing. For example, if you’re trying to get into a healthy sleeping habit, don’t watch TV or do work in the same place you sleep (i.e., your bed). Instead, create a separate environment for TV (e.g., your living room or your couch) and another separate environment for doing work (e.g., your office or your desk). That way, each time you’re in an environment, it triggers one habit, and only one habit: e.g., I’m at my desk, so I’m doing work, or I’m at my bed, so I’ll go to sleep.

10. Tracking habits can help reinforce them.

• Tracking your progress and making what you’ve accomplished more visible can be a powerful way to reinforce habits.

• Example: a calendar or habit journal where you put an “X” every day you succeed at a habit (e.g., go to the gym or meditate). After a while, you’ll see a long streak of X’s, which is satisfying, as you get a visual representation of your progress (which, as you may remember from earlier, is hard to see, especially early on). Moreover, it reinforces the habit, as you’ll be tempted to keep doing the habit just to avoid breaking your streak of “X’s”.

• Example: get two jars, and put a bunch of paperclips in one of them. Each time you succeed at a habit, move a paperclip from the full jar to the empty one. Over time, as you do the habit more and more, the empty jar will fill up, giving you another great visual sense of progress. You may start doing the habit more and more just to fill up that jar.

• Note: tracking your habits is yet another habit to develop, so there is a cost to this, but it’s the type of habit you invest in once, and then it pays dividends when working on all your other habits.

11. Never miss twice.

• Eventually, everyone fails at their habits. You’ll have a bad day, or get sick, or just screw up.

• The key is not to give up just because you failed. Since all success takes a long time, a single failure along the way will likely have no measurable impact on the final outcome. So don’t stress it, and immediately get back on track. The goal is not to be perfect, but to be consistent.

• In other words, it’s OK to miss once now and then, but never miss twice in a row.

Rating: 4 stars